The next day Gordon headed to Emma’s Eatery for lunch, as always, and found the entire town covered in sheets of paper. Someone had typed out a document of several pages and stapled, taped, and nailed copies of it to light poles, cars, trucks, storefronts, fire hydrants, bus stops, shrubbery, and, turning down one side street, Gordon saw a black cat with paper taped to its back. The sheets were typed in standard twelve-point font, with the usual one-inch margins, and if you didn’t look too closely they could have been taken from any number of reports that crossed Gordon Locke’s desk during his insurance days. The haphazardly scattered pages were out of order, but the document was short and Gordon was able to put them together easily enough. He started to read it standing up, intending to continue on to Emma’s, but he didn’t move until he’d read the entire thing.

To the entire town of Wake, Oregon:

I am The Child of Light.

As soon as we get this fact out the way, we can move on to other things. Important things. But for now, you must understand that I am the Child of Light. This is not some kind of metaphor or assumption of hubris or the declaration of a lunatic. You just need to know this, okay? I was born of light, in the light, and someday I will proceed into the light. So, you may refer to me as The Child of Light.

Okay. Next on the docket is this Floating Luminosity. Many of you have seen it, some of you have even seen it twice, and are well aware of how powerful it is. While I have not yet seen it for myself yet, due to an unfortunately retarded work schedule, I cannot stress how truly powerful this new and ghostly force is. Talk with anyone who has seen it, and you will understand.

Also: do not underestimate it. Do not chalk it up to some rare yet perfectly explainable natural phenomena. Just because you do not understand something does not mean you should write it off. In fact, you probably want to do the opposite. Ask questions. Figure out what this thing is you don’t properly understand, lest it come back on you a hundredfold.

For one thing, there are some pretty obvious parallels between the Floating Luminosity and the work of the legendary Gothic horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Anyone who doesn’t see this simple fact is a blathering fool. No, I’m not talking about the Elder Gods or the Old Ones or any of that Lovecraftian mythological crap. That stuff might be interesting if you’re stoned and listening to Led Zeppelin, but hideous ancient warring gods with made up names don’t really come into play here, do they? No, they fucking don’t. What I’m talking about is Colour. Colour is the British way of spelling of Color. Don’t ask me. What I mean to say is that H.P. Lovecraft wrote a story called, “The Colour Out of Space” that’s about a meteorite landing on some poor schlep’s New England farm and really fucking things up. The meteorite is radioactive or something. The soil and the plants are poisoned by it, and start glowing faintly in the dark, and everyone living on the farm goes crazy. There’s roughly about fifty scared horses in the story, and finally it all really goes to hell when this bright, otherworldly light comes pouring out of the farm’s well and IS THIS STARTING TO SOUND FUCKING FAMILIAR, ANYONE?

Not that I’m saying the Floating Luminosity is a product of an alien intelligence. Not at all. Hell, anytime anything strange happens in this illiterate country some dork gets a hard-on for aliens and start spouting all these space alien conspiracy stories. It makes me sick, really. What happened to this country? Are space aliens really the extent of our imagination? The apex of critical thought? Fuck that shit. All I’m saying is that the colours in H.P. Lovecraft’s story shares certain similarities to our very own Floating Luminosity and that’s interesting, isn’t it?

Now we come to the two dead people that have appeared in Wake in the last week. I know death is a touchy subject, especially for the victims’ families, but I think it’s pretty obvious to anyone who’s read the paper that these people probably deserved it. The who-what-why doesn’t really matter, but they probably were into some kind of dirt and that’s why the Luminosity chose to cull them first.

AHHH! you shout. How do you know the deaths are connected in the first place? And in response I fire back: how do you know they’re not connected? The Floating Luminosity has appeared twice, as far as we know, and each time a body has been found the next day. A dead body, without any visible signs of trauma of the sort which usually induce death. What is this? you say. Motherfucking X-Files? Maybe. Maybe this is motherfucking X-Files! Maybe we have slipped into a strange quasi-world where 1990’s television programming is bleeding into our daily lives and the best we can hope for is hanging out with Jerry Seinfeld or, God help us, the cast of Friends. I don’t know. I really don’t. What I do know is that strange days have come to Wake and it is now up to us, as a collective group of concerned citizenry, to deal with the consequences and revelations the Floating Luminosity has brought to our well-groomed shores. Don’t delay in facing this new phenomenon, arguing among yourselves like a bunch of disbelieving pussies in a horror movie. Gird up your loins. Stay on guard.

Sincerely,The Child of Light

Gordon folded up the manifesto and slipped it into his back pocket. He continued walking along the paper strewn street, lost in thought, and didn’t pay much attention to where he was until he found himself sitting on a stool at Emma’s, sipping coffee among a crowd that talked only of the Floating Luminosity, the dead woman, and The Child of Light. The buzz in the room was intoxicating, stronger than holiday buzz, and it made everything appear more clearly to him, like a magnifying glass coupled with a flashlight. The Child of Light was ridiculous, obviously, some jokester trying to stir up trouble, but you couldn’t deny some of his points. The Floating Luminosity was definitely a phenomena now, and one that deserved closer inspection.

Buddy Wells, who sat on a stool beside Gordon, shouted something to the old man beside him and they both laughed. Gordon smiled and looked around the diner. Everyone was talking like this, animated as they joked and theorized and threw long swooping gestures into the air.